National Land Erosion Inventory (2002-2019). Potential erosion

This Inventory aims to locate, quantify and analyse the evolution of erosive phenomena, with the ultimate aim of delimiting as accurately as possible the priority areas of action in the fight against erosion, as well as defining and evaluating the actions to be carried out, within the plans and programmes whose elaboration is also attributed by Royal Decree 1415/2000, establishing the organizational structure of the Ministry of the Environment. The realisation of the Inventory is structured with a provincial base in order to be able to take advantage and use the most recent information that is generated both in the National Forestry Inventory (IFN) and in the Forest Map of Spain 1:50.000 (MFE50) work also carried out by this Directorate General and elaborated at provincial level. Potential erosion is defined as erosion that would take place exclusively taking into account climate, geology and relief conditions, i.e. without taking into account the vegetation cover or its modifications due to human action. As a result, the potential erosion allows us to approximate what would happen if the vegetation cover disappeared in a certain area, although this data must be qualified according to the resilience of the vegetation, mainly determined by climatic conditions (dry, cold,...), since the effects of this supposed disappearance of vegetation will be more or less durable and, therefore, more or less severe, depending on the time it takes to recover the cover. The objective is therefore to make a classification of the surface according to the potential to present laminar erosion or in watering vessels. For this purpose, only the three factors of the RUSLE model that characterise this potential have been considered: the rain erosion index (R), soil erosionability (K) and topography (LS), grouping the results obtained (potential soil losses, in t·ha-1·year-1) into erosive levels, as is done with the estimate of current losses. On the other hand, as already mentioned, this result should be qualified according to the natural climatic capacity of the vegetation, which is estimated from the classification in phytoclimatic subregions. The inventory is carried out between the years 2002-2019.